This article addresses the impact of the fall of the Iron Curtain on migration and migration policy in Austria. The introduction explains Austria's reasoning for prioritizing trade over migration policy relative to the Central and Eastern European countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain. This decision was a paradigm shift, abandoning the guest worker model of migration and introducing immigration legislation with family migration as a core element. The legislative reforms brought about changes in all areas of migration governance. Despite the restrictive policy stance toward migration, in-migration gained momentum to the extent that, by 2022, Austria had one of the highest shares of migrants in its population in the European Union. As the official understanding of Austria is to be an immigration country by chance rather than by choice, it has consequently been unable to develop the necessary instruments to promote innovation and economic growth with the help of migrants. Instead, restrictive policies that guide the settlement and integration of migrants in general, and of asylum seekers in particular, may jeopardize social cohesion and the sustainability of economic growth.

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with the local Iron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent the local Iron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that the local Czech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities’ common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.